"What I worry about is that people are losing confidence, losing energy, losing enthusiams, and there's a real opportunity to get them into work."

4) On cake:

"My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it."

5) On oratory skills:

"My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg."

6) On tennis:

"I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around."

7) On how to vote:

"Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3."

8) On midnight feasts:

"There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge."

9) On the Lib Dems:

"The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition."

10) On his literary talents:

"Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books."

11) On Channel 5:

"I don't see why people are so snooty about Channel 5. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects."

12) On drugs:

"I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn't go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar."

13) On people visiting their MP:

"The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas."

14) On using a mobile phone whilst driving:

"I don't believe that is necessarily any more dangerous than the many other risky things that people do with their free hands while driving - nose-picking, reading the paper, studying the A-Z, beating the children, and so on."

15) In conversation with Bob Crow about the London Underground strikes:

“I can’t sit down and negotiate with you on air when you’re holding a gun to Londoners’ head and threatening disruption to the greatest city on earth.”

16) On rich people:

“We should be helping all those who can to join the ranks of the super-rich, and we should stop any bashing or moaning or preaching or bitching and simply give thanks for the prodigious sums of money that they are contributing to the tax revenues of this country, and that enable us to look after our sick and our elderly and to build roads, railways and schools.”

17) On blurting:

"If we judged everybody by the stupid, unguarded things they blurt out to their nearest and dearest, then we wouldn't ever get anywhere."

18) On why he voted for David Cameron:

"I'm backing David Cameron's campaign out of pure, cynical self-interest."

19) On Margaret Thatcher:

"I realise that there may be some confusion in my prescriptions between what I would do, what Maggie would do, and what the government is about to do or is indeed already doing... I don't think it much matters, because the three are likely to turn out to be one and the same."

20) On envy:

“There is no point in wasting any more moral or mental energy in being jealous of the very rich. They are no happier than anyone else; they just have more money. We shouldn’t bother ourselves about why they want all this money, or why it is nicer to have a bath with gold taps. How does it hurt me, with my 20-year-old Toyota, if somebody else has a swish Mercedes? We both get stuck in the same traffic.”

21) On sexism:

"I have not been more robust towards female rather than male assembly members and I do not believe I have been remotely sexist."

22) On being fired by Michael Howard:

"My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters."

23) On swimming in the City:

"But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors."

24) On London jobs:

"London is a fantastic creator of jobs - but many of these jobs are going to people who don't originate in this country."

25) On commuting when Blair was Prime Minister:

"I forgot that to rely on a train, in Blair's Britain, is to engage in a crapshoot with the devil."

26) On ping pong

"Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it an saw an opportunity to play Wiff-waff."

27) On the EU:

“First they make us pay in our taxes for Greek olive groves, many of which probably don’t exist. Then they say we can’t dip our bread in olive oil in restaurants. We didn’t join the Common Market – betraying the New Zealanders and their butter – in order to be told when, where and how we must eat the olive oil we have been forced to subsidise.”

28) On the "religion of peace":

“The most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers.”

29) In the run up to the Olympics:

"Times have been tough, the economy has been tough. But I want to bring forward a fantastic manifesto for taking the city forwards."

30) On promises:

"It is easy to make promises - it is hard work to keep them."

31) On being a journalist:

"It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time."

32) On winning the London mayoral race:

"Never in my life did I think I would be congratulated by Mick Jagger for achieving anything."

33) On terrorism:

"I think the risks that people see of terrorism are incredibly important but we are very confident we have got the right people on it and the risks have been minimised."

34) On being Tory:

"I'm a one-nation Tory."

35) On China:

"Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase..."

36) On inequality:

“No one can ignore the harshness of that competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.”

37) On the City of Portsmouth:

"Too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs."

38) On UKIP:

“I can hardly condemn UKIP as a bunch of boss-eyed, foam-flecked Euro hysterics, when I have been sometimes not far short of boss-eyed, foam-flecked hysteria myself.”

39) On Nigel Farage:

"He's a rather engaging geezer".

40) On sex:

"I've slept with far fewer than 1,000"

41) On stag hunting:

"I remember the guts streaming, and the stag turds spilling out on to the grass from within the ventral cavity ... this hunting is best for the deer".

42) On cannabis:

"It was jolly nice. But apparently it is very different these days. Much stronger. I've become very illiberal about it. I don't want my kids to take drugs".

43) On George Bush and Iraq:

"The Americans were perfectly happy to go ahead and whack Saddam merely on the grounds that he was a bad guy, and that Iraq and the world would be better off without him; and so indeed was I."

44) On speed limits:

"No one obeys the speed limit except a motorised rickshaw."

45) On the BBC:

"What has the BBC come to? Toilets, that's what".

46) On exams:

"Exams work because they're scary"

47) On trains (before becoming Mayor of London):

"A horse is a safer bet than the trains".

48) On being overweight:

"Face it: it's all your own fat fault"

49) On how he was feeling after being sacked as Shadow Arts Minister:

"Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike, as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under."

50) On Tony Blair:

"It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall."